Last week we asked you to share your favorite text editor, then we rounded up the top five…
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A handy list of 27 plug-ins from the OpenSourceWare blog leans a bit heavy on the coding side of things—which is fine, and makes sense, because Notepad++ is a very handy tool for programmers. Among their picks, though, are some great, general purpose helpers.

"Compare" is an essential for anyone doing real text editing, as it lets you make changes in a saved copy and see the differences immediately.

"Explorer" provides a window you can pop open, then use to quickly open any file on your system.

"Multi-Clipboard" does just what it says—offers a place where you can see multiple copied items, then pick them out for pasting.

"CharM" pops open a special character map for choosing accents and other items not found directly on the keyboard.

"TopMost" allows you to keep Notepad++ always on top of other programs.

In addition, we'd recommend "AutoSave" and "SpellChecker," which do just what they sound like. We'd also recommend reading through OpenSourceWare's other picks for a look at what else Notepad++ can do. Not seeing all the plug-in options? Grab the full pack here.